About New York; Mustering A Parade And Rousing Old Memories

By DAN BARRY

Published: November 12, 2003

THE Veterans Day speeches had ended, taps had sounded, and the sun had given way to clouds the color of battleships. It was time to give a dollar to that old man on the corner for a red paper poppy that shows you care about veterans. Time to think about places called Bataan and Inchon, Khe Sanh and Baghdad. Time to watch a parade.

Here they came, marching and limping up Fifth Avenue, accompanied by the same martial music that had sounded when first they went to war. Now and then they got lost in the patriotic pageantry of teetering floats and marching bands. But then they would reappear to coax the modest crowd to cheer -- as if to signal their need for proof that a country still remembers.

That, really, is the purpose of the Veterans Day parade: to remind people. And whose job is it to make sure that the parade steps off each year?

A small band of brothers, it turns out, who on the day before the parade were squirreled away in a worn downtown office that has all the ambience of a penny-stock boiler room. Cigarette smoke stained the air. A portable radio played Abba. But the room's inhabitants, members of an organization called the United War Veterans' Council, were selling nothing more than a parade.

There was Indar Singh, an Army veteran who practiced law until his license was suspended; ''a lot of drinking,'' he said. Sober now, and waiting to regain his license, he has been volunteering as a ''media liaison,'' a title that made him smile. There was Bob DeLuccy, a Vietnam veteran who finds purpose in answering the phones and helping other veterans. Beats the drinking and drugging he used to do, he said.

There was Ed Bergendahl, who spent three years with the Navy during the Korean War. One of the ''office managers'' for the council, now that he is retired from the marine supply business, he said that for this year's parade he would be repeating his performance as MacArthur. ''I have the cap, the glasses, the pipe, the jacket,'' he said. ''I'm doing it for the veterans, and to honor the man.''

All the while, Paul Buono, the council's events coordinator, fielded last-minute calls, including one from a New York police officer who said that he -- and 75 other officers who were veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom -- wanted in on the parade. With the parade's start just 18 hours away, he asked, was it too late?

''You are more than welcome to march,'' Mr. Buono said. ''I'm the guy who puts the people in the line of march, and I will get you in.''

Mr. Buono, of Staten Island, is neither a veteran nor a son of a veteran. He said that he just happened to be the next-door neighbor of the council's executive director, Pat Gualtieri, and one thing had led to another. Now he edits the council's Web site, maintains its handful of donated computers, and organizes a few events each year, although none are as important as the parade.

WHERE are the British War Veterans of America mustering? What about the Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 779? Mr. Buono answered these questions with a calm not usually associated with parade organizers, which suggested that this parade was more open than closed. When asked about a parade participant listed as ''Rollerblader with American Flag,'' he sweetly said, ''She's just a patriotic person.''

The mission of Mr. Buono, Mr. Gualtieri, and their band of volunteers is harder than it seems. Encouraging people to remember wars of the past is the same as asking them to remember the gore that comes with the glory; to imagine the war dead striding up Fifth Avenue, there beside the war survivors.

But these parades can also be tutorials for the veterans-to-be: some of those adolescents who also marched yesterday, wearing the make-believe soldier's garb of their high school bands and junior R.O.T.C. programs. Imagine what they might learn from those men and women marching and limping in front of them. Imagine what they might learn from that old man who handed out paper poppies in return for donations toward the care of hospitalized veterans.

His name was Thomas Motola. He was 94 years old, and he was an Army veteran of World War II. ''I was in the South Pacific, New Guinea, Australia, Corregidor and the Philippines,'' he said.